Dwelling of The Muses

Dwelling of the Muses was created for the Recollect 2009 exhibition in London.

Using a process I later named Chronological Extraction, words were gathered from the antique book The Haunted Bookshop and reassembled into a new narrative. Each extracted word was recorded with its original page, line and word number, creating a traceable path back to the source text.

Among the phrases that emerged was "the dwelling of the Muses." This became the foundation for the work.

Housed within a cabinet of curiosities, the narrative unfolds through artefacts, specimens and symbolic objects inspired by the nine Muses of Greek mythology. Every object has a place within the story - from the preserved merman to the jars, relics and fragments that populate the shelves.

The accompanying scroll records the extracted words from which the narrative was built.